Text

A React component for displaying text.

Text supports nesting, styling, and touch handling.

In the following example, the nested title and body text will inherit the fontFamily from styles.baseText, but the title provides its own additional styles. The title and body will stack on top of each other on account of the literal newlines:

Nested text

Both iOS and Android allow you to display formatted text by annotating ranges of a string with specific formatting like bold or colored text (NSAttributedString on iOS, SpannableString on Android). In practice, this is very tedious. For React Native, we decided to use web paradigm for this where you can nest text to achieve the same effect.

In order to use this feature, you must give the view a width and a height.

Containers

The <Text> element is special relative to layout: everything inside is no longer using the flexbox layout but using text layout. This means that elements inside of a <Text> are no longer rectangles, but wrap when they see the end of the line.

<Text><Text>First part and </Text><Text>second part</Text></Text>// Text container: all the text flows as if it was one// |First part |// |and second |// |part |<View><Text>First part and </Text><Text>second part</Text></View>// View container: each text is its own block// |First part |// |and |// |second part|

Limited Style Inheritance

On the web, the usual way to set a font family and size for the entire document is to take advantage of inherited CSS properties like so:

All elements in the document will inherit this font unless they or one of their parents specifies a new rule.

In React Native, we are more strict about it: you must wrap all the text nodes inside of a <Text> component. You cannot have a text node directly under a <View>.

// BAD: will raise exception, can't have a text node as child of a <View><View>
Some text
</View>// GOOD<View><Text>
Some text
</Text></View>

You also lose the ability to set up a default font for an entire subtree. The recommended way to use consistent fonts and sizes across your application is to create a component MyAppText that includes them and use this component across your app. You can also use this component to make more specific components like MyAppHeaderText for other kinds of text.

<View><MyAppText>
Text styled with the default font for the entire application
</MyAppText><MyAppHeaderText>Text styled as a header</MyAppHeaderText></View>

Assuming that MyAppText is a component that simply renders out its children into a Text component with styling, then MyAppHeaderText can be defined as follows:

We believe that this more constrained way to style text will yield better apps:

(Developer) React components are designed with strong isolation in mind: You should be able to drop a component anywhere in your application, trusting that as long as the props are the same, it will look and behave the same way. Text properties that could inherit from outside of the props would break this isolation.

(Implementor) The implementation of React Native is also simplified. We do not need to have a fontFamily field on every single element, and we do not need to potentially traverse the tree up to the root every time we display a text node. The style inheritance is only encoded inside of the native Text component and doesn't leak to other components or the system itself.

Reference

Props

selectable

Lets the user select text, to use the native copy and paste functionality.

Type

Required

bool

No

accessibilityHint

An accessibility hint helps users understand what will happen when they perform an action on the accessibility element when that result is not obvious from the accessibility label.

Type

Required

string

No

accessibilityLabel

Overrides the text that's read by the screen reader when the user interacts with the element. By default, the label is constructed by traversing all the children and accumulating all the Text nodes separated by space.

Type

Required

node

No

accessible

When set to true, indicates that the view is an accessibility element. The default value for a Text element is true.

ellipsizeMode

When numberOfLines is set, this prop defines how text will be truncated. numberOfLines must be set in conjunction with this prop.

This can be one of the following values:

head - The line is displayed so that the end fits in the container and the missing text at the beginning of the line is indicated by an ellipsis glyph. e.g., "...wxyz"

middle - The line is displayed so that the beginning and end fit in the container and the missing text in the middle is indicated by an ellipsis glyph. "ab...yz"

tail - The line is displayed so that the beginning fits in the container and the missing text at the end of the line is indicated by an ellipsis glyph. e.g., "abcd..."

clip - Lines are not drawn past the edge of the text container.

The default is tail.

Type

Required

enum('head', 'middle', 'tail', 'clip')

No

nativeID

Used to locate this view from native code.

Type

Required

string

No

numberOfLines

Used to truncate the text with an ellipsis after computing the text layout, including line wrapping, such that the total number of lines does not exceed this number.

This prop is commonly used with ellipsizeMode.

Type

Required

number

No

onLayout

Invoked on mount and layout changes with

{nativeEvent: {layout: {x, y, width, height}}}

Type

Required

function

No

onLongPress

This function is called on long press.

e.g., onLongPress={this.increaseSize}>

Type

Required

function

No

onPress

This function is called on press.

e.g., onPress={() => console.log('1st')}

Type

Required

function

No

pressRetentionOffset

When the scroll view is disabled, this defines how far your touch may move off of the button, before deactivating the button. Once deactivated, try moving it back and you'll see that the button is once again reactivated! Move it back and forth several times while the scroll view is disabled. Ensure you pass in a constant to reduce memory allocations.

Set to false to remove extra font padding intended to make space for certain ascenders / descenders. With some fonts, this padding can make text look slightly misaligned when centered vertically. For best results also set textAlignVertical to center. Default is true.

Increase or decrease the spacing between characters. The default is 0, for no extra letter spacing.

iOS: The additional space will be rendered after each glyph.

Android: Only supported since Android 5.0 - older versions will ignore this attribute. Please note that additional space will be added around the glyphs (half on each side), which differs from the iOS rendering. It is possible to emulate the iOS rendering by using layout attributes, e.g. negative margins, as appropriate for your situation.